Friday, August 05, 2005
Touching Every Word Once
What better way to spend a summer evening, as I did last night, than to read James Wood’s collection The Broken Estate:
When it comes to language, all writers want to be billionaires. All long to possess so many words that using them is a fat charity. To be utterly free in language, to be absolute commander of what you do not own—this is the greatest desire of any writer. Even the deliberate paupers of style—Hemingway, Paves, late Beckett—have their smothered longings for riches, and make their reductions seem like bankruptcy after wealth rather than fraud before it. Pavese translated Moby-Dick into Italian. Realists may protest that it is life, not words, that draws them as writers: yet language at rush hour is like a busy city. Language is infinite, but it is also a system, and so it tempts us with the fantasy that it is closed, like a currency or an orchestra. What writer does not dream of touching every word in the lexicon once? In Moby-Dick, Herman Melville nearly touched every word once, or so it seems.
Thursday, August 04, 2005
Horses of a Different Color
In the current issue of The Bible Translator, D. J. Clark examines the adequacy of translations of the colors of horses in Zechariah and Revelation. He says:
There are four places in the Bible where horses are described in terms of their colours. These are Zech 1.8 and 6.2-3, 6-7, and Rev 6.2-8 and 19.11, 14. Some of the terms chosen for these colours in English Bibles can be rather misleading ... The basic problem arises because different languages divide up the spectrum in different ways, so that words that at first sight seem to be equivalent may turn out not to be when examined in context.
Clark concludes, for example, that in Zech. 1:8, the three colors adom, saroq, and laban should be brown, gray, and white.
Here’s what various versions have:
Wednesday, August 03, 2005
The grammar of Renaissance literature
From Gert Ronberg’s A Way With Words: The Language of English Renaissance Literature:
The Renaissance verb was in its syntactic behaviour often different from ours, which may cause some bewilderment to readers not accustomed to this. As an introductory illustrative example we make take the ‘verbal noun’ or the ‘gerund’ ... Because of its noun-like behaviour, the verbal noun can be preceded by the definite article: if it is, it cannot take an object but must be followed by an of-phrase instead; if it is not, it can take an object but not an of-phrase; compare the timing of his remarks was unfortunate with timing your remarks well is very important. However, this rigid rule was not a grammatical rule at all during the Renaissance, as we can see from the following two examples:
On Language 8/3: Using cartoons to teach ESL
No joke: Comic strips aid in learning, teachers say
Chicago Tribune
August 3, 2005
By Nathan Bierma
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Comic strips have to deliver their language in clean, powerful chunks. The cartoonist doesn’t have room for long, elegant sentences to convey meaning. A cartoon’s combination of pictures, vocabulary and phrasing makes it ideal for students learning English, Dahbany-Miraglia says.
“I use the cartoons to help them learn how to phrase in English,” she says. “You don’t learn to write by writing words. You learn by writing phrases.”
Tuesday, August 02, 2005
A Linguistic Proverb
Kolik jazyku znas, tolikrat jsi clovekem.
You live a new life for every new language you speak. (Czech)
Quoted in In Other Words: A Language Lover’s Guide to the Most Intriguing Words Around the World, by Christopher Moore.